“Religious feeling like everything else had become to the idle and empty mind a subject of joke and amusement.  What belonged to the theatre was brought into the Church, and what belonged to the Church into the theatre.  The better Christian feelings were not seldom held up in comedies to the sneer of the multitude.  Everything was so changed by the Constantinopolitans into light jesting, that earnestness was stripped of its worth by wit, and that which is holy became a subject for banter and scoffing in the refined conversation of worldly people.  Yet worse was it that the unbridled delight of these men in dissipating enjoyments threatened to turn the Church into a theatre, and the Preacher into a play actor.  If he would please the multitude, he must adapt himself to their taste, and entertain them amusingly in the Church.  They demanded also in the preaching something that should please the ear, glittering declamation with theatrical gesticulation; and they clapped with the same pleasure the comedian in the holy place and him on the stage.  And alas there were found at that period too many preachers who preferred the applause of men to their souls’ health.  At this period the objects of the faith excited, particularly in Constantinople, a very universal and lively interest, which was entertained from the Court downwards, though not always in the most creditable manner; but it was in great part not the interest of the heart, but that of a hypercritical and disputatious intellect, where it was not something far lower, to which the dispute about matters of faith served only as a pretext for attaining the exterior aims of avarice or ambition.  While the sanctifying and beatifying doctrines of the Gospel, which are directed to the conversion of the whole inner man were let lie quiet, everyone from the Emperor to the beggar busied himself with incredible interest about a few questions concerning which the Gospel communicates only just so much as is beneficial to the human spirit and necessary to salvation, and whose fuller expression at any rate belongs rather to the school than to practical life.  But the more violently these doctrinal disputes were kindled, disturbing and dividing States, cities, and families, so much the more people lost sight of the practical essentials of Christianity; it seemed more important to maintain the Tri-unity of God than to love God with all the heart; to acknowledge the Consubstantiality of the Son, than to follow Him in humility and self-denial; to defend the Personality of the Holy Spirit, than to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, love, peace, righteousness….In addition to these religious disputes came also political struggles, namely, the hard-fought wars of the Roman Empire with the Goths; so that the Empire at large presented the picture of a sea, tossed by violent storms.  But the unhappy schisms which at this time were severing Christians everywhere, shewed themselves in a particularly discouraging form in the Capital.  Under the late reigns several parties had been favoured; but especially those which, though again divided among themselves by differences of opinion, yet agreed in this that they all rejected the Nicene system of doctrine.  Constantius had bestowed his favour on the Arians; Julian during his short reign on all parties, at least in appearance,—to crush them all.  After Jovian’s early death Valens succeeded to power in the East, and with him, even more than with Constantius, Arianism, which he not only protected, but also sought to make predominant by horrible atrocities against the friends of the Nicene Decrees.  These had now been forbidden the use of all Churches and Church property, and the Arians had been put in possession of them.  But Constantinople still remained the scene of ecclesiastical strifes and partizanships.  Here where with a little good so much evil flowed from all three parts of the world, all opinions had their adherents; but the following parties in particular shewed themselves:—The Eunomians, professing an intellectual theology, which claimed to be able completely to explore the Being of God by logical definitions, and maintained in strict Arian fashion the Unlikeness of the Son to the Father, were very numerous in Constantinople (as is shewn by the fact that most of Gregory’s polemical utterances were directed against them), and injured earnest religious thought principally by this, that they used the doctrines of the faith exclusively as subjects for an argumentative dialectic.  The Macedonians, addicted to the Semi-Arian dogma of the Like Substance, and thereby somewhat more nearly approaching the Orthodox, and distinguished besides by an estimable earnestness of demeanour, and a monk-like strictness of manner, were indeed themselves excluded by the pure Arians from the property of the Church, but were ever being abundantly multiplied, partly in Constantinople itself, partly in the neighbouring regions of the Hellespont, Thrace, Bithynia, and Phrygia.  The Novatians, who even overstepped the Macedonians in the strictness of their practical principles, had somewhat earlier been on the point of uniting themselves with the Orthodox, from whom they did not differ on the chief doctrine in dispute, and with whom they found themselves under like oppression from the Arians; but the malevolent disposition of a few of the party leaders had stood in the way, and so they remained separate, and swelled the number of the opponents of Orthodoxy.  Lastly the Apollinarians too began to establish themselves there.  Their teaching was opposed to the acknowledgment of true and perfect Manhood in Jesus (for true Manhood lies in the reason especially); and there was at that time, as Gregory informs us, a report that an assembly of Apollinarian bishops was to be held at Constantinople, with a view of raising their teaching as to Christ into general notice, and forcing it upon the Churches.